How to Make Your Company's Site Crash

In November of 2008 while working as an editor at travel website VirtualTourist.com, I conceived and wrote a list for Reuters called the "The World's Top 10 Ugly Buildings and Monuments". An editor at Yahoo! picked it up, put it on the home page and before you could say "Brutalism" VirtualTourist literally crashed from all the traffic it brought us. Before the site was even back up and running we realized we had caused a bit of a thing, in part because we had named Boston's City Hall as the number one ugliest building in the world. News outlets around the world ran the story, the late Thomas Menino, former Mayor of Boston was quoted as saying he would use the article to get the structure torn down, and that night villagers took to the streets yelling "Industrial Chic!".

While the last event might not have happened, everything else did, and we ended up generating traffic and revenue that blew the lid off pretty much anything we had every done before. Between all the print, television, and digital coverage we estimated the ad value for this one list was well over $1 million if not more (our hits at the time were averaging about 1,000 per minute; this list spiked at 110,000 per minute). Needless to say, we made this article an annual tradition.

In an added bonus they also published our "Top 10 Good Luck Monuments Around the World" on the Yahoo! home page that week, giving us a bit of a double whammy.